Just to keep you abreast of the changes Giza and I have been doing with regards to the Forums and to maintain a sense of transparancy I want to take a moment to address a change we're recently enacted regarding the Account Approval process.

We have been using Mollum as a Spam filter for the last several years and it has been 90% effective in catching and not publishing a large quanity of Spam posts that we get on a daily basis. It has recently come to our attention that Mollum will no longer be supporting this platform. So in an effort to stave off the waves of Spam Postings to the forum and decrease our overall daily workload to maintain these forums, we have set all new Account Requests to be "Blocked until Verified" by either Giza or myself. Along with this we have set up an automatic e-mail explaining this to the e-mail address provided by the new user with a means to get in touch with us if we miss someone by accident.

So far roughly two dozen Spam-bot Accounts have been stopped at the door from being able to join and immediately post to the Forums. This has pretty much cut our daily efforts in half as we don't have to go through the recent posts, identify the Spam and send it to the Filter and then be Deleted.

We are hoping that this successful process continues, and we hope that by knowing what we're doing you'll be able to help us by advising your friends, who may be waiting to join, why their accounts are temporarily blocked while we get to their User Approval Request to approve it.